View: Chaperoning ‘non-news’ content reveals a technophobic, anti-creativity State

New know-how — particularly when it’s alluring — may be horrifying for some. However a few of these individuals may be good sufficient to make use of this ‘fright’ to push for a bigger, much less apparent agenda. Take the Nineteenth-Twentieth-century American composer John Philip Sousa. With the music recording trade in its infancy, Sousa wrote a searing essay in 1906 in opposition to early wax cylinder information, ‘Now, on this the 20 th century, come these speaking and enjoying machines, and provide once more to scale back the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders.’

Sousa, a patriot whose livelihood as a composer-conductor of ‘reside’ navy marches was threatened by the newfangled tech, added as a warning, ‘What of the nationwide throat? What of the nationwide chest? Will it not shrink? When a mom can activate the phonograph with the identical ease that she applies to the electrical mild will she croon her child to slumber with candy lullabys, or will the toddler be put to sleep by equipment?’

At a congressional listening to the identical yr, he vociferously argued, ‘These speaking machines are going to smash the inventive improvement of music on this nation.’ From all reviews, People continued to make respectable music, considered one of them even incomes a Nobel Prize in Literature for his songs in 2016.

In 2020 India, Sousa’s Bogey is just not ‘canned music’ however over-the-top (OTT) streaming content material. On October 12, the Supreme Court docket, responding to a PIL made by two advocates, Shashank Shekhar Jha and Apurva Arhatia, gave discover to GoI, the ministry of knowledge and broadcasting, and the Web and Cellular Affiliation of India (IAMAI), to react to the petitioners’ demand that ‘a correct board/establishment/affiliation for the monitoring and administration of content material on completely different OTT/Streaming and digital media platform’ be arrange.

Jha and Arhatia have been deeply involved about how the absence of censoring of OTTs permits ‘exploitation of artistic liberty’, which ‘pushes the boundaries on depicting infringements of social mores, similar to brutality, scenes and disgusting dialects’. They insisted on the necessity to ‘hold the worth system intact’, including, ‘That Hotstar is airing overseas sequence like Sport of Thrones, Amazon airing films like The Wolf of Wall Avenue, Netflix airing films like 365 Days and so on. in India that are having varied scenes inappropriate for the households together with nudity, attractive [sic], medicine, smoke, crime and so on’.

To not sound anti-international, they identified Indian sequence and movies like Mirzapur, Paatal Lok, Sacred Video games and Koffee with Karan being filled with ‘unseemly content material for atypical households and isn’t uncovered to any steadiness by any administration, which this manner is harmful for society at massive’.

Too Hotstar to Deal with

A month later, GoI reacted by issuing a gazette notification bringing digital audio-visual content material — with out distinguishing movies and net exhibits on OTT streaming platforms from information and present affairs on on-line platforms — beneath the I&B ministry from the sooner nuts-and-bolts ambit of the ministry of electronics and knowledge know-how.

On the face of it, the transfer is unsurprising, contemplating a Nanny State has been the ‘previous regular’ for the movie trade. OTT streaming providers like Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime, and so on, allowed a ‘room for grown-ups’, not solely by way of what may very well be considered in individuals’s dwelling or bedrooms, but additionally when and the place. As an alternative of a level-playing floor pushing cinemas to display movies with scenes that grown-ups may watch with out Bablis and Buntys being advised to close their eyes, OTTs have now been made to come back beneath Cinema Chaachi’s purview.

Even earlier than the GoI notification, the Akshay Kumar-starring horror-comedy movie, Laxmii Bomb (renamed Laxmii, as a result of that type of ‘derogatory’ nomenclature has been culturally sanctioned just for the ‘Kali Patakha’), launched on Hotstar — not launched in theatres attributable to Covid-19 — acquired the ‘cinema corridor’ response from the same old suspects, ‘Hindu sentiments outraged by making enjoyable of Hindu beliefs (whereas displaying Muslim superstitions in a helpful mild!)’. With no dearth of ‘outrageable movie critics’ lined up, one can anticipate new Mirzapurs and Sacred Video games to talk in chaste Hindi and present much less flash and flesh being streamed.

The truth that OTT content material — displaying what may be achieved when nobody is continually peering over a ‘content material creator’s’ shoulders — is consuming into the previous cable trade’s territory worldwide provides not less than one foyer a ‘motive’ to chop this new channel for leisure all the way down to measurement. However, technologically, it is a shedding recreation. Talking in regards to the ‘OTT vs community’ battle performed out within the US 5 years in the past, former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said what ought to have been (however isn’t) apparent to Indian authorities, ‘The essential cable networks didn’t have full video-on-demand. We have been reliant on promoting. It’s not that the streamers had superior programming, they’d superior know-how.’

In the present day, ‘cord-cutting’ is not area of interest. From a excessive of 105 million in 2010, the variety of pay-TV households within the US got here all the way down to about 86.5 million in August 2019 — this, earlier than the surge in streaming post-Covid. This quantity is estimated to go all the way down to not less than 72.7 million within the subsequent three years. Indian shoppers don’t inhabit a distinct planet.

WhatsApp With the Occasions?

However what’s ‘unusual’ is the conflation made right here of ‘information and present affairs’ and ‘leisure’. Within the title of controlling ‘faux information’ that platforms like Fb, WhatsApp and Google proceed to go the buck on, content material like movies and net sequence are additionally being introduced beneath the scanner. It’s not as if OTT leisure falls outdoors the purview of Indian legal guidelines.

Content material thought-about to advertise enmity, hatred and ill-will… ‘with deliberate and malicious intention’ falls beneath Sections 153(A) and 295(A) of the Indian Penal Code. Youngster pornography, extolling terrorism, and so on, fall beneath the Data and Know-how Act. When it comes to tax legal guidelines, too, OTT providers fall beneath On-line Data Database Entry and Retrieval (Oidar) within the items and providers tax (GST).

Maybe the clue to OTT authorities chaperoning lies in (lack of) command and management considerations elsewhere. With media corporations shifting their greatest — and hottest — content material to current, or their very own new streaming, providers, a burgeoning trade waits to be tapped by tappers and file-pushers. If, within the course of, the ‘unique’ job of sifting the wheat of knowledge and broadcasting from the chaff of pretend information, hate speech, and so on, is outsourced to GoI, the likes of Fb and Google might be sitting prettiest on this newest victory for our latter-day, tech and innovation-phobic John Philip Sousas.


Views expressed are creator’s personal